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Entrenchment And/Or Destabilization? Reflections on (Another) Two Decades of Constitutional Regulation of Capital Punishment

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Entrenchment And/Or Destabilization? Reflections on (Another) Two Decades of Constitutional Regulation of Capital Punishment `Entrenchment and/or Destabilization? Reflections on (Another) Two Decades of Constitutional Regulation of Capital Punishment Carol S. Steiker & Jordan M. Steiker Introduction Fifty years ago, in the early 1960s, death penalty abolitionists in the United States began a litigation campaign to bring an end to capital punishment in America. Over the next few decades, abolition would sweep through Europe and the Anglo-American legal world, where it now appears firmly established. In the United States, however, the constitutional abolition imposed by Furman v. Georgia1 in 1972 was tentative and short-lived. The Supreme Court’s re- authorization of the death penalty in 1976 led to a raft of new capital statutes and a rising tide of executions. The Court’s approach to the death penalty in the post-1976 “modern era” of American capital punishment diverged, however, from the deferential, federalist approach of the preceding two centuries, during which states retained virtually complete control over death penalty practices. Rather, the Supreme Court inaugurated an ongoing project of federal constitutional review of capital punishment, through which it developed an intricate body of Eighth Amendment doctrine. The United States became the first and only one of its peer nations to move not from formal retention of the death penalty to abolition, but rather from retention to regulation. 1 408 U.S. 238 (1972). Writing in the mid-1990s,2 we criticized the Supreme Court for failing to provide effective regulation of capital practices, while simultaneously creating a misleading impression of extensive judicial oversight. The Court’s capital jurisprudence, though arcane and intricate, placed few meaningful restrictions on state capital practices. But the very existence of a seemingly extensive (though in fact minimally intrusive) body of federal constitutional law worked to entrench and legitimate the death penalty. We lamented the ways in which judicial efforts to rationalize capital punishment had created the worst of all possible worlds – a system which did very little to cure the arbitrary and discriminatory administration of capital punishment but gave the reassuring appearance of doing much more. We attributed the soaring rates of death sentences and executions in the 1990s in part to the legitimating effect of the Supreme Court’s project of constitutional regulation. Then everything changed. Starting in 2000, the number of death sentences and executions plummeted for more than a decade, and several states recently have legislatively repealed the death penalty for the first time since the 1960s. In the mid-1990s, American abolition appeared an extremely remote prospect. Today, less than two decades later, the potential for abolition looks very different, and the question seems to be more one of when and how – rather than whether – the American death penalty will expire.3 Our consideration of the causes of this precipitous and unexpected turnaround has led us to the surprising conclusion that the same regulatory reforms of the modern era that we described as legitimating and entrenching the practice of capital punishment have also contributed to its recent destabilization. Doctrines 2 Carol S. Steiker & Jordan M. Steiker, Sober Second Thoughts: Reflections on Two Decades of Constitutional Regulation of Capital Punishment, 109 HARV. L. REV. 357 (1995). 3 See Carol S. Steiker & Jordan M. Steiker, The Beginning of the End?, in CHARLES J. OGLETREE & AUSTIN SARAT, EDS., THE ROAD TO ABOLITION: THE FUTURE OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 97 (2009). and institutions created by constitutional litigation have slowly created an environment less hospitable to the continued robust use of the death penalty and have provided a blueprint for further reform or even abolition, but in ways that were not anticipated by the initial reformers (nor by us, writing in the 1990s). In this paper, we trace the ways in which contemporary efforts to regulate the death penalty have produced such unforeseen and surprising results. We contrast the effects of the death penalty reforms of prior generations – such as narrowing the scope of death-eligible crimes, privatizing and centralizing executions, and improving execution methods – with the reforms of the modern era, arguing that the current regime represents a fundamental break with past modes of regulating capital punishment. First, and foremost, the death penalty is now subject to extensive legal regulation, in contrast to the virtually unregulated practice of prior generations. Second, extensive legal regulation has produced a significant gap between death sentencing and executions, creating a large class of death row inmates who are housed in increasingly restrictive conditions, many of whom face no foreseeable likelihood of execution. Third, death penalty litigation is increasingly performed by a specialized defense bar, as “generalists” have been replaced by (or supplemented with) capital trial lawyers, state postconviction lawyers, and federal habeas lawyers. Fourth, and relatedly, the primary focus of capital trials has shifted from the question of guilt or innocence of the underlying offense to the punishment issue of life or death. This shift is not merely one of degree or emphasis; it amounts to an entire rethinking of the obligations of trial counsel and of the function of the death penalty trial. Fifth, death-penalty states have made sentences of life without possibility of parole (LWOP) virtually the sole alternative to death as the punishment for capital offenses (in contrast to earlier generations, in which death-eligible offenses were punishable by terms of years or life imprisonment with parole eligibility). These reforms of the present era, unlike those of prior generations, contain within them the seeds of destabilization and have in fact rendered the American death penalty quite precarious. This is true notwithstanding the fact that most of the changes to American capital punishment in the present era were not designed or expected to undermine the death penalty. Rather, contemporary capital practice reflects various efforts to tame the death penalty by making its administration more regularized, law-like, and humane. Such a path might have been expected to increase the death penalty’s legitimacy by adapting it to contemporary sensibilities, and during the early period of the modern era, the reforms likely supported the continued use of the death penalty. But whatever legitimacy gains have been produced by the modernizing project of capital reforms, they have been swamped – especially during the past decade – by the countervailing dysfunction wrought by extensive legal regulation of the death penalty. The sheer cost of capital proceedings, the uncertainty of executions, and the resulting dramatic decline in capital sentencing are looming problems for the continued use of the death penalty in the United States. Judicial abolition – on the heels of legislative abolition by a critical mass of states – is a genuine prospect on the horizon. These observations offer insights into at least two debates about capital punishment. First, one of the most important and perplexing questions about the death penalty is the relationship between “reform” and “abolition.” On the one hand, “civilizing” the death penalty by removing its worst excesses – whether in the form of “botched executions” or unsavory applications, such as against the young or mentally impaired – might stabilize the institution and mute public opposition.4 On the other hand, capital “reform” might be viewed as the precursor to abolition, especially if the “reform” tends to highlight the viability of non-capital options or undermines the perceived goals of capital punishment.5 By contrasting the effects of earlier generations of death penalty reform with those of the modern era, we are able to develop a fine- grained picture of the complex ways that particular death penalty reforms have restructured the institutional landscape and made it more or less favorable for abolition. This very particular picture, in turn, may help us to understand more generally how legal reform can lead to either entrenchment or destabilization or both, so that law reformers can better predict the effects of future efforts. Second, how does the prospect of abolition in the United States relate to the already completed abolition of our peer countries? Some sociological theorists see abolition as the end stage of a centuries-long process of “civilization” and the development of the modern liberal state in which the death penalty is progressively narrowed, limited, privatized, and rendered more humane, until eventually it disappears.6 In this account, American progress toward abolition has been slowed or halted in recent decades, but its eventual accomplishment will be part of the same long trajectory that our peer countries have followed. Others have argued that American abolition, if it occurs, will owe a large debt to the example of our peer countries, who will put political pressure on the United States to join them and who will influence our citizens 4 See generally Carol S. Steiker & Jordan M. Steiker, Should Abolitionists Support Legislative ‘Reform’ of the Death Penalty, 63 OHIO ST. L. J. 419, 425 (2002) (arguing that “[a]bolitionists could and should engage in nuanced, case-by-case analysis of the legitimating or entrenching potential of each proposed legislative reform”). 5 Id. at 430 (describing potential “anti-legitimating reforms” that might “plant
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